Ben Lindbergh

Sam Miller

What would happen if two statistics-minded outsiders were allowed to run a professional baseball team? It’s the ultimate in fantasy baseball: You get to pick the roster, set the lineup, and decide on strategies -- with real players, in a real ballpark, in a real playoff race. That’s what baseball analysts Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller got to do when an independent minor-league team in California, the Sonoma Stompers, offered them the chance to run its baseball operations according to the most advanced statistics. Their story in The Only Rule is it Has to Work is unlike any other baseball tale you've ever read. We tag along as Lindbergh and Miller apply their number-crunching insights to all aspects of assembling and running a team, following one cardinal rule for judging each innovation they try: it has to work. We meet colorful figures like general manager Theo Fightmaster and boundary-breakers like the first openly gay player in professional baseball. Even José Canseco makes a cameo appearance. Will their knowledge of numbers help Lindbergh and Miller bring the Stompers a championship, or will they fall on their faces? Will the team have a competitive advantage or is the sport’s folk wisdom true after all? Will the players attract the attention of big-league scouts, or are they on a fast track to oblivion? It’s a wild ride, by turns provocative and absurd, as Lindbergh and Miller tell a story that will speak to numbers geeks and traditionalists alike. And they prove that you don’t need a bat or a glove to make a genuine contribution to the game.

Our Wild Experiment Building a New Kind of Baseball Team

The Only Rule Is It Has to Work

Travis Sawchik

Two New York Times-bestselling authors chronicle the next revolution in baseball: the data-driven quest to build better players Fifteen years after Michael Lewis brought the Oakland A's' groundbreaking team-building strategies to light in Moneyball, every team takes a data-driven approach to evaluating players, and the league's smarter front offices no longer have an edge. As Ben Lindbergh and Travis Sawchik reveal in The MVP Machine, instead of out-drafting, out-signing, and out-trading rivals, baseball's best minds have turned to out-developing opponents, eking extra runs out of athletes who were seen as finished products. Lindbergh and Sawchik take us inside the transformation of former role players into home-run kings, and show how washed-up pitchers have emerged as aces. The MVP Machine charts the future of a sport and offers a lesson for any business: success comes from developing the people already working for you, rather than from bringing in star performers from elsewhere.

Ben Lindbergh

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